4 ms·

A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. A point to consider is that all complex systems are functions of multiple variables and more often than not, n

by mupra 4y ago

A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. A point to consider is that all complex systems are functions of multiple variables and more often than not, non-linear. A complete view of the past and the present is not a guarantee of the future. At best, it can be a guide for having cautious behavior.

WoodenChair 4y ago
You don't even have the beginnings of any meaningful predictive curve with just a few data points. It's just selective function fitting if there's not a rich data set. For example, you can draw many curves through 2 data points, but you can also draw a straight line. The Our World in Data "Primary vs. planted forest" data that he cites for the "Old Growth Forest Cover" chart has just 2 data points (1990 and 2019).
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > You don't even have the beginnings of any meaningful predictive curve with just a few data points. It's just selective function fitting if there's not a rich data set. Having a rich data set doesn't help. https://twitter.com/SonerCagaptay/status/1389387850551005192 https://twitter.com/SonerCagaptay/status/1389387850551005192
sdenton4 4y ago
(It's a day ending in y, so here I go again...) It depends on the sign of the exponent. Negative exponential growth, as we see in wild animal populations, is not guaranteed to turn into an S-curve. As the passenger pigeon would attest, were any of them left. Meanwhile, to consider a positive exponent case, there's a real question of what will actually cause the bend in the curve of human population. Will it be getting our collective shit together and slowing down? Or will it be a massive die-off after we've destroyed the ecosystems we depend on for things like air to breathe and water to grow our crops?
- cornel_io 4y ago
  Did we "get our shit together" in all the rich countries on the planet, which are barely at replacement levels? Did we hit a massive die-off level by overexploiting our resources? No. We got rich and having kids was less economically valuable (in fact it becomes a cost in rich societies). The Elon Musks of the world are now more concerned about lack of growth than the opposite. Who knows if Elon is right or you, but it's not as trivial as it seems to predict whether we will ever hit the carrying capacity of the planet.
  - postkey 4y ago
    "The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production. There was no shortage of oil any more than the three-day-week had been caused by coal shortages. What they did, perhaps, give us a glimpse of was what might happen in the event that our economies depleted our fossil fuel reserves before we had found a more versatile and energy-dense alternative. . . . That system has been on the life-support of quantitative easing and near zero interest rates ever since. Indeed, so perilous a state has the system been in since 2008, it was essential that the people who claim to be our leaders avoid doing anything so foolish as to lockdown the economy or launch an undeclared economic war on one of the world’s biggest commodity exporters . . . And this is why the crisis we are beginning to experience will make the 1970s look like a golden age of peace and tranquility. . . . The sad reality though, is that our leaders – at least within the western empire – have bought into a vision of the future which cannot work without some new and yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source (which rules out all of the so-called green technologies whose main purpose is to concentrate relatively weak and diffuse energy sources). . . . Even as we struggle to reimagine the 1970s in an attempt to understand the current situation, the only people on Earth today who can even begin to imagine the economic and social horrors that await western populations are the survivors of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, the hyperinflation in 1990s Zimbabwe, or, ironically, the Russians who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union." https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-you-can-imagine/ https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-yo...
black_puppydog 4y ago
> A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. It's also the initial part to a bell curve.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  The downward slope after the peak of this bell curve happens when the population dies off.
Trombone12 4y ago
Don't forget the infinite families of higher order polynomials that can have arbitrary shapes beyond the point the observed data ends.
- nerpderp82 4y ago
  How many physical systems are of those higher order polynomials? Don't most systems have a low number of forcing functions?

by mupra 4y ago

WoodenChair 4y ago

You don't even have the beginnings of any meaningful predictive curve with just a few data points. It's just selective function fitting if there's not a rich data set. For example, you can draw many curves through 2 data points, but you can also draw a straight line. The Our World in Data "Primary vs. planted forest" data that he cites for the "Old Growth Forest Cover" chart has just 2 data points (1990 and 2019).

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> You don't even have the beginnings of any meaningful predictive curve with just a few data points. It's just selective function fitting if there's not a rich data set. Having a rich data set doesn't help. https://twitter.com/SonerCagaptay/status/1389387850551005192 https://twitter.com/SonerCagaptay/status/1389387850551005192

sdenton4 4y ago

(It's a day ending in y, so here I go again...) It depends on the sign of the exponent. Negative exponential growth, as we see in wild animal populations, is not guaranteed to turn into an S-curve. As the passenger pigeon would attest, were any of them left. Meanwhile, to consider a positive exponent case, there's a real question of what will actually cause the bend in the curve of human population. Will it be getting our collective shit together and slowing down? Or will it be a massive die-off after we've destroyed the ecosystems we depend on for things like air to breathe and water to grow our crops?

cornel_io 4y ago
Did we "get our shit together" in all the rich countries on the planet, which are barely at replacement levels? Did we hit a massive die-off level by overexploiting our resources? No. We got rich and having kids was less economically valuable (in fact it becomes a cost in rich societies). The Elon Musks of the world are now more concerned about lack of growth than the opposite. Who knows if Elon is right or you, but it's not as trivial as it seems to predict whether we will ever hit the carrying capacity of the planet.
- postkey 4y ago
  "The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production. There was no shortage of oil any more than the three-day-week had been caused by coal shortages. What they did, perhaps, give us a glimpse of was what might happen in the event that our economies depleted our fossil fuel reserves before we had found a more versatile and energy-dense alternative. . . . That system has been on the life-support of quantitative easing and near zero interest rates ever since. Indeed, so perilous a state has the system been in since 2008, it was essential that the people who claim to be our leaders avoid doing anything so foolish as to lockdown the economy or launch an undeclared economic war on one of the world’s biggest commodity exporters . . . And this is why the crisis we are beginning to experience will make the 1970s look like a golden age of peace and tranquility. . . . The sad reality though, is that our leaders – at least within the western empire – have bought into a vision of the future which cannot work without some new and yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source (which rules out all of the so-called green technologies whose main purpose is to concentrate relatively weak and diffuse energy sources). . . . Even as we struggle to reimagine the 1970s in an attempt to understand the current situation, the only people on Earth today who can even begin to imagine the economic and social horrors that await western populations are the survivors of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, the hyperinflation in 1990s Zimbabwe, or, ironically, the Russians who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union." https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-you-can-imagine/ https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-yo...

black_puppydog 4y ago

> A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. It's also the initial part to a bell curve.

FollowingTheDao 4y ago
The downward slope after the peak of this bell curve happens when the population dies off.

Trombone12 4y ago

Don't forget the infinite families of higher order polynomials that can have arbitrary shapes beyond the point the observed data ends.

nerpderp82 4y ago
How many physical systems are of those higher order polynomials? Don't most systems have a low number of forcing functions?